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Overview

Title: Attraction Anxiety

Type: eBook / supplementary product

Word count: 15,000

Subject: Explores the concept of ‘attraction anxiety’, its causes and how a man can conquer it

The Problem

Anxiety is a villain who lurks in the shadows and steps out to exact his crippling influence at the most inopportune times–not least when a man is in the presence of a beautiful woman. The man feels anxiety’s presence throughout his body, in his dry mouth, trembling hand and thumping heart, and hears it in every muttered, muddled sentence that clumsily escapes his lips. It ruins things for him; he can’t represent himself whilst feeling so nervous and therefore can’t attract the woman. Without attraction, dating is impossible. Without dating, girlfriends don’t exist. And after every ruined attempt to interact with a woman, anxiety slinks back into the recesses of the man’s mind, to await the next time–if and when it comes–that it can once again pervade his body with the same socially distracting and debilitating symptoms.

My Solution

Nerves are natural when the stakes are running high and they don’t often feel higher to a man than when he’s trying to woo a woman. A novel approach to combating attraction anxiety was needed that did away with the overly dry, text-heavy treatises already out there. This was my solution: a fairly short, visually interesting eBook that laid out the whys and how-tos in a way that carried the reader from start to finish in a swift, enjoyable way–and crucially, a way that did actually address the key issues for him. I didn’t just want him to feel like he knew more about how to tackle attraction anxiety; I wanted him to actually have a bit less of it as soon as he finished the book and a lot less of it after putting the final instructions it recommended into action.

Because I like good metaphors, I decided to use a visual one to structure the eBook’s contents: an infinitely long wall with a staircase against one side of it and an extremely awkward climbing wall on the other. On the platform at the top of the stairs and climbing wall is the goal, the target: the girl. A man has two routes to battling attraction anxiety and successfully reaching her: either use a steady, structured approach, or a disorganized, dangerous one. This eBook taught the former.

Metaphors don’t come much more visual than that.

Excerpt #1:

Practically every human emotion exists because it serves a productive purpose in life. Happiness boosts motivation, productivity, morale. Jealousy protects important assets. Anger punishes those who have done something wrong. Even sadness and depression can be highly useful emotional states: they make a person dwell on issues that could potentially, if ignored, cause more problems and harm. Our emotional wiring is by no means perfect. We over-react, under-react, become sad for too long, jealous for no productive reason—we have our flaws. But generally speaking, our brains are excellent at adjusting our emotional state to match the situation we’re in, which allows us to cope with it in the best way possible. If we’re standing on the edge of a cliff, we get scared. If we’re about to have sex, we get sexually excited. If we’ve been wronged or taken advantage of, we get angry. The vast majority of the time, our emotions help us. That’s why they’re there: they’ve evolved to help us cope. But these days cliff-edges are signposted and fenced, and sex is mostly not about making babies. Yet we still fear falling to our deaths and still get horny when we want and are about to get some action. The message here is clear: we are still running on biological programming that is not just centuries or millennia old, but millions of years old. Our software gets minor tweaks and updates, but it is mostly the same as it has been for longer than it’s possible to accurately comprehend. Understanding this concept is the first step towards eradicating nerves and anxiety when approaching and talking to women with the goal of attracting them.

Over the course of five numbered lessons and six alphabetized tasks, the male reader is taught about the evolutionary, biological and cultural reasons for why attraction anxiety exists and how he can unpick its seams to drain its destructive influence from his social interactions with women. In other words, stop being so damn nervous when he talks to hot girls.

As he progresses through the book, the illustrations depict a nondescript man gradually stepping up and towards the woman, his goal. While on the reverse side of the wall, a gaggle of clueless guys are shown awkwardly clambering, or failing to clamber, up the perilous ‘bad approach’ side of the wall. They represent men without a structured, smooth approach to tackling the problem of attraction anxiety (men who don’t have access to this book!).

Expert #2:

Reason #3: Men feel time is against them.

Men have a finite amount of time to find women they deem suitable to be the bearers of their children. Again, you must think of this in a historical as well as contemporary sense. You may never want to have kids, but that doesn’t mean you don’t have the genetic coding that makes you want to seek and win over a woman who would be a good mother of your children. As men and women get older, their chances of attracting a young and fertile partner (the best kind) get smaller, because they themselves are less preferable as a mate—they’re older, have less time left to live, are probably less strong, etc. There’s a real pressure on men and women to find good, attractive partners before it’s too late or before it’s really, really hard work to do so. So men unconsciously and often consciously worry that they’re running out of time. The longer they go without pair-bonding (becoming a unit with a woman for a fairly long period of time), the less likely they see themselves as ever being able to do so. This makes every approach a man makes a high-pressure event. He has to make it work, otherwise time draws on and opportunities diminish.

Every man must scale the wall to make a successful approach and every man is competing with every other man to reach the top. Of course, each man is attempting to approach and interact with a different woman, but nevertheless, the climb is the same. They must conquer the sheer face by getting past their own anxiety-inducing worries and hang-ups.

In Summary

I was and still am really happy with this eBook. It was read over 15,000 times after winding up on a free eBook site and I think the metaphor it uses, although it’s slightly overblown, makes it different enough to read all the way through.

Everyone likes a happy ending. Except the guys stuck in shadow on the left.